40 Years After Stonewall

Being Gay and Homeless

We should not let the 40th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising pass without a mention of the difficulty of being gay and homeless in America. It is especially rough losing a place to live and a place to maintain some level of privacy. In Cleveland, no matter if you are hetero or homosexual, there is no place for sex in the shelters. Most taxpayers would say, "Good, that is the way it should be," but as shelter stays get longer and longer this reality is difficult to defend. We have no shelters for couples and the entry shelters require a married family to often split up. Even the transitional shelters are same sex only facilities in most cases. Imagine going into a facility in which you are expected to stay for one or two years away from your significant other. Shelter residents do get weekend passes, but if both adults are homeless they have very few options.

Most of the shelters for men in Cleveland host heavily African American populations who are not always the most tolerant group. NPR cited surveys on Wednesday which show that African Americans are the most conservative on gay rights. While progress has been made, there is still a high level of intolerance in the shelters for homeless gay men. More surprisingly to me is the hostility toward lesbians in the shelters especially by staff. The fastest way out of a shelter for women is to show some affection for another woman. I don't know if it is because there are usually children in the shelters for women or lesbians are not as prevalent and so are not tolerated. In a few cities, there are shelters that serve gays and lesbians, but not Cleveland.

Transexuals are part of the shelter population--mostly men who appear as women and want to be treated as a women. In the past, we were able to provide hotel vouchers to avoid any potential hate crimes. Plus, the shelter operators were religious-based institutions that were not the most tolerant of gays or lesbians let alone transexuals or the transgendered. We no longer have the funds for the vouchers and the main shelters are more secular than before. But transexuals who appear outwardly as women are excluded from the shelters for women. I knew a guy who lived in the shelter as a woman for 3 months, but was eventually caught and banned from the facility. She never hurt anyone or caused any harm, but was kicked out because she had the option of two different ways to relieve herself, I guess. The state or federal government gives us very little guidance in the local community for how to serve the transgendered. At this point, there is a small community within the men's entry shelter of transexuals. They seem to look out for eachother, and I have not heard of many problems except that they are stuck without many options for movement to somewhere more stable.

Brian
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